› added 9 years ago

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TIL: Joan Kroc, wife of McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc, donated over $1 billion to the Salvation Army. At one point, she tried to donate the Padres baseball team to San Diego, but the MLB rules forbid public ownership.

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XEdrR TIL the blue planet used to be purple. 250 million years ago, the oceans lost all their oxygen and one of the only things to survive was a purple alga/bacteria which would have given the seas an irridescent violet hue. Geologists have found remnants of this purple bacteria embedded in ancient rock.
9YPLm TIL that in the Rosenstrasse protests in 1943 during the middle of WWII, thousands of non-Jewish German women protested the deportation of their Jewish husbands to the concentration camps. The protests were successful, but it was the only mass protest in Nazi Germany against the deportation of Jews.
w1a7 TIL inner speech (AKA the voice inside your head) is accompanied by tiny muscular movements in the larynx
xVLgw TIL in 2008, Jeremy Clarkson published his bank details in his Sun newspaper column to prove nobody could take money from his account. Somebody then donated £500 to a Diabetes charity from his account.
grxK8 TIL Dashrath Manjhi, the "Mountain Man," spent 22 years carving a 110-meter path through a mountain using just a hammer and chisel. Motivated by grief after his wife died due to a long route to the hospital, he shortened the journey from 55 km to 15 km.